their
wages were sinking lower and lower till finally the whole generation
died out. The small farmers who lost the support of spinning and other
by-industries succumbed in the competition with the larger producers.
The cottagers whose commons were lost to them by enclosures frequently
failed to find a niche for themselves in their own part of the
country, and became paupers or vagabonds. Many of the same sad
incidents which marked the sixteenth century were characteristic of
this period of analogous change, when ultimate improvement was being
bought at the price of much immediate misery.

[Illustration: Carding, Drawing, and Roving in 1835. (Baines: _History
of Cotton Manufacture_.)]

Even among those who were supposed to have reaped the advantages of
the changes of the time many unpleasant phenomena appeared. The farm
laborers were not worse, perhaps were better off on the average, in
the matter of wages, than those of the previous generation, but they
were more completely separated from the land than they had ever been
before, more completely deprived of those wholesome influences which
come from the use of even a small portion of land, and of the
incitement to thrift that comes from the possibility of rising. Few
classes of people have ever been more utterly without enjoyment or
prospects than the modern English farm laborers. And one class, the
yeomen, somewhat higher in position and certainly in opportunities,
had disappeared entirely, recruited into the class of mere laborers.

In the early factories, women and children were employed more
extensively and more persistently than in earlier forms of industry.
Their labor was in greater demand than that of men. In 1839, of 31,632
employees in worsted mills, 18,416, or considerably more than half,
were under eighteen years of age, and of the 13,216 adults, 10,192
were women, leaving only 3024 adult men among more than 30,000
laborers. In 1832, in a certain flax spinning mill near Leeds, where
about 1200 employees were engaged, 829 were below eighteen, only 390
above; and in the flax spinning industry generally, in 1835, only
about one-third were adults, and only about one-third of these were
men. In the still earlier years of the factory system the proportion
of women and children was even greater, though reliable general
statistics are not available. The cheaper wages, the easier control,
and the smaller size of women and children, now that actual physical
power